Navigation menu

Newsletter 2017 01 29

Call for Contributions: To contribute news items, please send a short email to the editor, Richard Zanibbi (rxzvcs@rit.edu). Contributions might include conference and workshop announcements/updates/reports, career opportunities, book reviews, or anything else of interest to the TC-11 community.

IAPR TC-11 (Reading Systems) Newsletter (January, 2017)

Message from the Chair: New Leadership, Twitter, and Datasets

TC-11 was one of the first IAPR TCs that introduced a larger “leadership” team including more volunteers apart from the chair and vice-chair. Continuing with this good practice, I am pleased to present you the new leadership team for the next term.

I never quite liked the term leadership in this context. After all, our job as volunteers is to serve the community: provide continuity and facilitate the community in whatever the community wants to do. I suppose that a facilitating team does not sound good, so we’ll stick with leadership in the lack of any better term. In any case, one of our primary responsibilities is to listen, and try to define the roadmap of the community together with all the TC-11 members. Any idea you have about how to make TC-11 more useful, and how our activities may evolve with time would be more than welcome! Also, feel free to contact us by email at iaprtc11@gmail.com.

Apart from the monthly email newsletter, we have established a twitter account that hopefully will be more useful for immediate and direct communication. Do follow [@IAPR_TC11](https://twitter.com/iapr_tc11) and make sure you send us any opinions or information worth spreading.

Feel free also to share any useful resources you have with the community. I remind you that TC-11 can host datasets and other online resources you might want to share – just visit the TC-11 web page and follow the links to the datasets (direct link: http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets ).

Dimosthenis Karatzas, TC-11 Chair
(dimos@cvc.uab.es)

Message from the Editor: Introduction, Thanks, and Requests

Hello, please allow me to introduce myself. I am Richard Zanibbi, the new TC-11 newsletter editor. I am also an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the United States, where I direct the Document and Pattern Recognition Lab. I'm originally from Canada, and completed my PhD at Queen's University (Kingston) followed by nearly two years at CENPARMI in Montréal before moving to RIT (and the USA) in 2006.

I would like to thank Dr. Dimosthenis Karatzas for inviting me to serve as the TC-11 Communications Officer, Prof. Gernot Fink, who edited this newsletter with great skill for years and has been very helpful as I transition into this new role, and Dr. Masakazu Iwamura for his invaluable help with this newsletter and the TC-11 web pages. Thanks also to others who helped me sort out the contents for this newsletter, including Dr. Andreas Fischer and Prof. Marcus Liwicki. I am grateful for this opportunity, and I look forward to serving the TC-11 community.

I want to ask everyone to please send any pertinent news items to share by email rxzvcs@rit.edu, and to consider sharing our newsletter with those outside of TC-11 who may be interested. Let's keep our community strong by keeping both our community and other communities informed of our activities.

Call for Proposals: DAS 2018 (Repost)

Following the successful organisation of the 12th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems in Santorini (Greece) last April (DAS 2016), by our colleagues Apostolos Antonacopoulos and Basilis Gatos, we are now soliciting proposals for organising and hosting DAS 2018.

Individuals and groups who are interested in Document Analysis Systems are invited to submit proposals for organizing and hosting DAS 2018. The event should preferably take place in late summer/fall, but is not limited to this period.

The submission deadline is January 31st, 2017. Proposals should be submitted to the TC-11 chair (Dimosthenis Karatzas) and vice-chair (Masakazu Iwamura).

If you already know whether you are interested in preparing a proposal, please send us your expression of interest. Note that an expression of interest is not a commitment to make a formal proposal nor an official bid. If you need further information concerning DAS, please feel free to contact us.

The final selection among competing proposals will be made short after the deadline by the DAS Steering Committee, which is composed of all those who have themselves organized or contributed substantially to past DAS workshops.

ICDAR 2017 Competitions : An Overview

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the ICDAR'17 that will be held in Kyoto (November, 10th-15th) will organize a set of competitions dedicated to a large set of document analysis problems. You are cordially invited to participate in this scientific event that will be a very good opportunity to objectively compare the quality of algorithms in different categories of challenges. Please consider submitting your algorithm(s) to all competitions in the same category, as we asked the individual competition organizers to synchronize their evaluation metrics, if possible. You will find below the different categories of competitions, and the URL of their respective website, that will allow you to get all the required information for participating.

ICDAR 2017: Accepted Workshops and Tutorials

Nine workshops and three tutorials will be offered at ICDAR 2017. You can find the names and organizers for each below. Please direct any questions to the workshop and/or tutorial chairs (contact information is provided below).

IGS 2017: Paper Submission Deadline Extension (Feb. 5th, 2017)

We are pleased to announce the eighteenth edition of the biennial Conference of the International Graphonomics Society (IGS) that will take place from 18 to 21 June 2017 in Gaeta, along the central western coast of Italy. The Conference theme is "Graphonomics for e-citizens: e-health, e-society, e-education" and will be a single track international forum for discussion on recent advances in the fields of science and technology of handwriting and other graphic skills, and their impact on the daily life within the e-society.

Important dates:

Paper submission: February 5, 2017

Author notification: March 15, 2017

Camera-ready version: April 30, 2017

Author registration: April 30, 2017

Topics of interest (but not limited to) are:

Neuroscience: Development, planning and control of writing and drawing movement;

Pattern Recognition Letters: a special issue is scheduled in conjunction with the IGS Conference on the same topics of the Conference in the fields of Handwriting Analysis and Recognition and Cultural Heritage Applications.

International Journals of Forensic Document Examination: a special issue is scheduled in conjunction with the IGS Conference on the same topics of the IGS Conference in the field of forensic applications.

Human Movement Science: a special issue is scheduled in conjunction with the IGS Conference on the same topics of the IGS Conference in the field of Neuroscience and Neural Engineering.

Invited speakers

Prof. Marc H. Schieber, Head of the Neural Control of Hand and Finger Movements Laboratory, University of Rochester Medical Center, School of Medicine and Dentistry.

Prof. Oliver Tucha, Head of the Department of Clinical and Developmental Neuropsychology, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Groningen.

ICFHR 2018: Moved to Niagara Falls, USA

After much discussion by the ICFHR 2018 conference chairs and with the approval of TC-11, the site for ICFHR 2018 has been moved from Rochester, NY (USA) to Niagara Fall, NY (USA). There are multiple reasons for this change; they include higher value for participants (e.g., better food, meeting rooms and surrounding environs) and Niagara being a more attractive meeting place for existing and potential members of the TC-11 community. The total cost to run the conference, as well as for individual participants should remain the same.

The ICFHR 2018 Call for Papers and Conference Poster are now available - please distribute these to anyone who may be interested. Additional information about important dates, the conference site, travel, the organizing committee, etc. may be found in the ICFHR 2018 web pages.

Richard Zanibbi, TC-11 Communications Officer
(rxzvcs@rit.edu)

Postdoctoral Position in Machine Learning (LITIS, Université de Rouen, France)

The Machine Learning team at LITIS (France) is opening a postdoctoral position for a candidate with a strong experience in Machine Learning, with application to one of the following topics: Speech Processing, Handwriting Processing, Computer Vision, or Document Image Processing.

The candidate will be involved in pursuing the development of Handwriting recognition and document image processing technologies to extend the PlaIR platform that was originally developed for digitizing old Newspapers www.plair.univ-rouen.fr http://www.plair.univ-rouen.fr. New contributions of the candidate are expected regarding Handwriting Recognition (HWR), by combining deep optical models with deep language models. He will contribute with other members of the team to various research projects in this domain.

The successful candidate should have advanced programming skills (Python, C/C++, Matlab). Experience of developing models within one of the popular frameworks such as Torch 7, TensorFLow, will be particularly appreciated.

Application

Application should include a curriculum vita, a brief statement of research interests, and the names of at least three references.

The IAPR is the International Association for Pattern Recognition. IAPR's Technical Committee No. 11 (TC-11) includes researchers and practitioners working with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and more generally the analysis and recognition of information in documents.